Tools: Free End Of Heroku: What It Means For Your Apps 2026

Posted on Feb 9

• Originally published at encore.cloud

Heroku recently moved to a "sustaining engineering model." No new features, no new enterprise contracts. The platform stays running for existing customers, but active development has stopped.

Heroku launched in 2007 and was acquired by Salesforce for $212 million in 2010. After removing its free tier in November 2022 and years of slowing feature development, the February 2026 announcement made the trajectory official.

For teams planning a move, the biggest shift is toward infrastructure ownership: deploying to your own AWS or GCP account rather than renting another managed platform. But there are several directions and here's what each option offers.

If you want to replicate Heroku's git push workflow while owning your infrastructure, Encore Cloud provisions managed resources in your own AWS or GCP account (powered by Encore, an open-source framework with 11k+ GitHub stars). You declare infrastructure as type-safe objects in your TypeScript or Go code, and Encore provisions the corresponding managed services. Everything else is standard TypeScript or Go.

On AWS, this provisions RDS, SNS/SQS, and CloudWatch Events. On GCP, it provisions Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Scheduler. Networking, IAM, encryption, and backups are configured automatically following cloud provider best practices.

Deployment works like Heroku: git push encore main. The infrastructure runs in your account, visible in the AWS or GCP console. Local development runs everything with encore run, every pull request gets an automatic preview environment, and built-in distributed tracing and metrics come included.

For teams using AI agents like Cursor and Claude Code, infrastructure-from-code means infrastructure doesn't drift from application logic. When AI changes your code, infrastructure updates automatically to match, and guardrails like type validation and compile-time checks are built in so there's no separate Terraform or YAML falling out of sync.

Companies like Groupon already use this at scale with TypeScript and Go, deploying to both AWS and GCP (Azure is not yet supported).

Render is the most direct Heroku replacement. The concepts are nearly identical: git-push deploys, managed Postgres, background workers, cron jobs. If you want the smallest possible change from your current workflow, Render is the shortest path.

Source: Dev.to